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“... in the holes with speculation and gossip. She ‘hears’ that the Duchess is said to have turned black as a prune. It was always ‘said’ that the Duchess picked up her most exciting sexual skills while travelling in the Orient. These snippets she blithely records as if her duty as journalist did not extend beyond reproducing hearsay. About Maître ...”

“... Tennessee, founded by her friend, Fanny Wright. What Wright had in mind was a commune in which black and white children would be educated together in a Temple of Science. The Nashoba community also advocated the practice of free or ‘rational’ love. Mrs Trollope’s views on this and other aspects of the Nashoba programme, and the degree of her ...”

“... of a new round of ‘affirmative action’ in sectors of the economy designed to accommodate black South Africans. Be that as it may, Coetzee’s father’s loss of his job, the family’s subsequent move to Worcester, about a hundred miles north of Cape Town, along with the parents’ decision to have the boy educated in English, the language of the ...”

“... writings of the Church Fathers and biblical commentaries, he also had works by Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, Montaigne, Petrarch, Tasso and Boccaccio. The earl of Leicester’s library at Penshurst included books in many languages on the latest in beekeeping, drainage, poetry, forestry, military strategy, heraldry, optics and surgery.Sometimes a ...”

“... I went to see London Contemporary Dance Theatre and Ballet Rambert at the Oxford Apollo and one of Michael Clark’s earliest forays at the Museum of Modern Art, barebottomed in Bodymap and long sleeves. There wasn’t much more than that going on in London but they did get Merce Cunningham at Sadler’s Wells every now and again, and that was a revelation. I ...”

“... of ‘clerico-fascist’ vipers. (One member of Cowling’s Peterhouse caucus was said to sport a black armband on the anniversary of Franco’s death.) For much of the 1980s Cowling and Trevor-Roper would engage in a ‘long-running and increasingly public slanging-match’, which, as Jonathan Parry notes in The Philosophy, Politics and Religion of British ...”

“... spare, usually shorn of adverbs and adjectives, and her plots were similarly unencumbered. When Michael Chabon decries the tyranny of the ‘contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory short story – a.k.a. the New Yorker short story’, it’s Taylor who is probably to blame. She thought that dramatic situations were unnecessary: normal ...”

“... back to Bristol and stuck his head – ginger beard and curly hair – out of the window of his black Austin A40, yawning and moaning into the autumn night as he steered along the motorway. Surprisingly little has been written recently about birdwatching. For Mynott, the image of the old lady paying her sub to the RSPB, hanging out fat balls and talking to ...”

“... of Beowulf in the late 1940s; it was first published in 1952. Recent versions by Seamus Heaney and Michael Alexander might have made the need for the republication of Morgan’s less urgent for anyone who just wants to get hold of a good modern Beowulf, but as an early and defining Morgan poem it remains indispensable. First of all, the poem is a ...”

“... for cinematography – and the scene is much the most powerful in the film. It almost makes Michael Nyman’s hyperbolic score (the music in Planet of the Apes is subtle by comparison) tolerable. In all such scenes of epiphany (Charlton Heston breaking down at the sight of the half-buried Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet of the Apes is ...”

“... come up with the names of Hugh Kenner, Denis Donoghue, Geoffrey Hill, Robert M. Adams, Michael Foot, Norman Brown, J. Middleton Murry, George Orwell, André Breton, F.R. Leavis. Said’s overlooking of most (not all) of these might strike you as a shade provincial, but they aren’t much to his point, since what he really means is ‘the major ...”

“... was boredom. Most people were interesting first time round. ‘Wednesday 9 July 1941: Lunched with Michael Foot, whom I liked very much. He hated and hates Chamberlain even more than I. His views, though a trifle too leftist, are sound.’ But they did not turn out to be permanently palatable. ‘Friday 3 October 1952: After dinner we watched a political ...”

“... did not have to be kosher-English to appreciate the scene. Indeed it may even have helped to be black, motherless and Welsh, to mention only one subject who effortlessly achieved world media renown at the same time down in the Mall. The prominence of non-Anglos in the proceedings is quite logical – like MP Bernie Grant’s defence of monarchy on the ...”

“... are Iraq and Iran, both sources of uncertainty and threat. What strategies are available, Paul Michael Brannagan and Danyel Reiche ask in their useful overview of the politics of the 2022 World Cup, to such a small and vulnerable state when it attempts to achieve some measure of security and influence? Acquiring powerful allies and a military overlord is a ...”

“... born in Market Square, slap bang in the middle of Lichfield, in September 1709, the elder son of Michael Johnson and his wife, Sarah, rather old and very proud parents. They had, Johnson recalled, ‘not much happiness from each other’, and immediately deposited their ambitions in him. Michael, the son of a labourer, had ...”